I was traveling through airports when I happened to see this story on the news, so I haven't caught up on all the details, but one thing disturbed me: the lying heads went on and on about how mentally disturbed this man must have been, and how could we identify such mentally disturbed people in the future, but never once did they ponder whether this was a rational response to an untenable situation. Never once did they question the role of a convoluted, maddening, and probably illegal tax code.
It is difficult living in a country where there is little rule of law because the multitude and complexity of laws makes virtually everyone eligible for a felony conviction at the arbitrary whim of unaccountable government officials. If Mr Stack had run into such persecution his response may well have been the only rational one. What other avenues were open to him to escape from the situation? Good riot police know that they should never cut off an angry crowd's escape routes, as they will have no choice but to fight, and most of us have heard of the dangers of a cornered animal, but what opportunities did Mr Stack have to avoid what he (probably accurately) described as a kind of slavery?
In short, if Mr Stack had no viable alternatives, or if he was feeling especially patriotic, this response may not have been irrational. If all his friends and colleagues never suspected that he was insane, it may be because he wasn't. The fact that his suicide note was angry and used profanity does not necessarily mean that Mr Stack was mentally unbalanced - it may simply mean that he had good cause to be angry. If someone tried to enslave you, would you be angry? Would you say some naughty words? If so, does that mean that you are wrong or mentally ill to object to being enslaved, or does it mean that the bastard who is trying to enslave you is wrong?
The fact is, all Americans have become or are becoming the slaves of the United States government, which in turn has become the instrument by which those who take more than they give (at present 60% of Americans) have harnessed the productive classes for their own benefit. This is the tyranny of the majority, and it looks like it will only increase in the future. Talking to people overseas, I have met many who envy American wealth but none who envy American "freedom".
The fact that the lying heads on the News never addressed this question concerns me. The American media is no longer interested in discovering the truth, they merely do the bidding of their employers - and with the U.S. government being the largest advertiser, guess who their employers are? It may well be that Mr Stack really WAS crazy, but we will never learn the truth from the media.
You are correct that it wouldn't be much use in an American house. However keep in mind that modern commercial architecture generally eschews load bearing walls in favor of pylons (reinforced concrete columns, that is) with "curtain walls" of brick or other material.
While houses in the USA are still built with 150 year old technology and load-bearing walls, most new public buildings in the USA are not - and thus this sort of protection could be quite useful. Modern architecture generally eschews load bearing walls in favor of pylons (reinforced concrete columns, that is) with "curtain walls" of brick or other material. A curtain wall giving way may even be an advantage in relieving some of the pressure from a blast, though how much of an advantage is open to debate.
Of course, the protection would only be partial, but I can see how this might be useful in some places.
Oversold as "bombproof wallpaper"? Of course. Useless? No.
One problem with your hypothesis: Regulations for the financial sector (and all sectors) dramatically INCREASED during the Bush administration.
Sure, Noonan's article is full of the usual partisan crap that comes out from the losing side in the last election, but it is nevertheless true. She does at least note that no one is looking to the Republicans for a solution either.
But I think she misses an awful lot:
First, there are many reasons why people have lost hope in America, and economics is just one small part of it. The moralistic laws passed by both parties to try to force everyone to adhere to their belief systems - whether religious or secular - are also responsible for a great deal of revulsion at what America has become. Truth is, there's no great difference between the person who tells you to profess a certain dogma or die, and the person who tells you that you'd better buckle up or face a hefty fine. They're both assholes out to tell others what they must do. Certainly there's room for persuasion and facilitating (making easy) good choices, but all the "leadership" on both left and right is committed to the idea that Americans must not be free.
Second, there IS a great deal of real OPTIMISM among many educated people - it's just that that optimism is somewhat retarded by the idiocies being perpetrated by government.
There is much to be optimistic about - we stand on the edge of what could be a golden age, if we can just get past the idiots who have hijacked the political and economic systems of the world for their own benefit. If we could prune back the cartels that dominate the financial, medical, and academic sectors (among others) and introduce freedom to compete and to cooperate without undue and burdensome regulations, then the future is very bright indeed.
But it looks like it might not be happening in America.
On the one hand, I absolutely agree with the author. I graduated from high school in 1988, and within 5 years I had recognized that the single most important course I took was a half-semester of typing. (Naturally, other subjects - taken as a whole - were more important.)
However, while students today would still be well-served to learn how to type, the technologies are now being developed which will eventually allow even faster data manipulation with direct mind interfaces that will make keyboards appear, as Scotty in Star Trek IV put it, "quaint". Intelligent students of education have long understood that by the time an educational institution understands the importance of new information, it has already been superseded - so I expect typing classes will become mandatory just about the time that the mainstream has forgotten about keyboards entirely.
We've known for years - or should have known - that at least some breeds of dog are pretty smart.
With recent discoveries about the importance of RNA and lateral genetic transfers, we may yet discover that dogs are our closest relatives.
Of course, other animals may also be smarter than we give them credit for, but these neotenous wolves have certain qualities in common with us that no other animals have, including an understanding of our body language - and, according to some studies, dogs may even have an ability to read our minds to some degree (look at the studies where the owner leaves home and then, though they are 30 miles away, the moment they turn around to come home their dog goes to the door to wait for them - also consider the use of dogs and cats to warn epileptics of seizures).
. . . and many of us have suspected that there are more such links between conditions which may be pathological at one extreme, and extremely beneficial at another extreme. The schizophrenia versus creativity duality is one (and long known - we have all heard that "there is a fine line between genius and insanity"), and the whole area surrounding Asperger's Syndrome is likely another.
Writing in from McMurdo Station, I should note that the actual sites that are currently manned are not especially good for freedom, as they follow the laws of the respective nations that have established them. The Antarctic Treaty is likewise becoming more and more restrictive. The great advantage is that there are many places where there is no one whatsoever, so that with sufficient technology and resources, a freedom-loving group might be able to establish their own community. On the other hand, there has been some serious interest in seasteading lately, by Patri Friedman and others.
http://seasteading.org/
While Alberta has many things going for it, my friends there report that the place is socially conservative rather than libertarian. This presents its own set of problems, and I would not advise any Canadian province as a final destination, though Quebec may resist the changes longer than most. In fact, I would not recommend any existing nation, though of the English-speaking ones New Zealand may be the best.
I agree about the cruelty inherent in the U.S. legal system, and in fact in U.S. culture. Unfortunately, telling Americans to grow a backbone will not help, as many Americans are convinced that it is only because they have backbones and love God that they can be sufficiently cruel to those whom they suspect of doing wrong, or at least of having done something they don't quite understand so it must have been very bad.
Trying to reason with these people is pointless, because after all they have been educated in American schools, which for the last 100 years have been actively involved in retarding intellectual growth. (This is absolutely true - the people who set up the system even wrote books about how they were going to prevent the children of the lower classes from becoming doctors and lawyers because there were already plenty of those.) Any reasoned argument is met with furrowed eyebrows and looks of suspicion, and the more "righteous" they are, the quicker you'd best walk away.
Science Fiction author David Brin has already suggested installing peer-to-peer relays for text messages on mobile phones, as a means to ensure emergency communications could be maintained in case of a partial or complete breakdown of the wireless networks. Such a system would have been quite useful, for example, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and the bandwidth is so small as to be almost unnoticeable.
Of course, encryption would also be nice, but this would be a good start, to establish such a standard.
Note that the Nextel network already allows peer-to-peer calls, although it does not use phones as relays.
So, the first number was off by a factor of ten, not counting the silly estimate of 25 Pounds when even 2.5 Pounds was doubtless too much - meaning that the original number was off by at least a factor of one hundred.
Still nothing compared to what government and government-related groups can come up with to scare people. Anyone remember how we were all told in the '80s that 1.5 million children were kidnapped each year in the United States, when the real relevant figure (kidnappings by strangers) was closer to 150? That was off by a factor of 10,000.
And how about those Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq? We're going to find them any day now.
Yes, what this proves to us once again is that as bad and unethical as industry can be, they still can't compete with government and the do-gooders.
The FDA started out with a good mandate: make sure that what sellers are selling is actually what they claim to be selling.
If the seller says it's 100% disease-free milk, then that's what it should be - not watered down milk or from a diseased cow. And so on.
I know a man who had inherited a severe form of heart disease. All the males in his family died in their 40s, and he was getting close - he could barely stand the exertion of standing up. Then he was one of a handful of people who got some experimental gene therapy - and his health was pretty much restored.
That was about ten years ago.
His son is in his thirties now.
The question is, will the gene therapy that saved his father be legal in time to save him?
How many needless deaths will there be before it is legal?
If the FDA wanted to restrict such therapies only to patients who are deemed extremely likely to die within the next five years, that would be reasonable enough while they tested these drugs. If the FDA let doctors and patients make choices about what risks they were willing to take, but made sure that patients and doctors were fully informed as best as possible as to the potential risks of untested medicines - that would be reasonable too.
But, no, the FDA wants to cover their collective ass, and they know that no one pays attention to people who die for lack of access to new drugs, while they do pay attention to "failures" of the regulatory system - so the FDA outlaws new medicines that might save hundreds of thousands of terminal patients each year, on the grounds that these medicines might harm these dying patients.
These multinationals do pay substantial amounts of tax, on their American operations. Obama wants to increase the tax they pay on their operations outside the U.S.
Of course, these companies pay taxes on their foreign operations in the foreign jurisdictions, so this amounts to double taxation on their profits. No wonder they try to reduce what they owe by legally changing their headquarters to a nation like Bermuda that does not tax them twice.
Of course, a U.S. investor in a U.S. multinational ends up getting taxed three times for the same profits, so no wonder that U.S. citizens are leaving too - and they tend to be in the same 5% that pays 80% of U.S. taxes.
The United States government is attempting to commit suicide, and eventually they will succeed.
The US still has the largest percentage of the population completing upper secondary education (HS) of all countries in the world except Japan, and over the past forty years it has steadily increased (81% in 1960 to 87%).
Talk about lies, damned lies, and statistics.
School systems routinely cook the books, and I'm not sure about the national figure, but many school systems have graduation rates from 50 to 70 percent.
How can they fake that, you ask? Easy. They remove every student who "transfers" to a different high school from their numbers, even though many of those students never complete the transfer or even know (or care) that their high school has officially listed them as transferred. The 50 to 70 percent numbers are based on a more reliable comparison between the number of high school freshmen and the number of graduating seniors.
Granted, if you include G.E.D.s the numbers are higher, but G.E.D.s are a joke. So are many of the high school diplomas - I've known High School graduates who couldn't read theirs.
One (of many) problems with the American medical system is that it artificially restricts the number of people who can become doctors, which in turn drives up pay. Stop the hazing (which the typical process of becoming a doctor is) and increase the number of medical schools, and you'll probably get lots more qualified candidates who will work for more reasonable rates.
Japan has lots of medical colleges and only a few law schools - and despite everything else costing twice what it does in the USA, medical care is much better AND cheaper.
(My parents have used both systems, which is how I know.)
Is there any reasonable and objective way to determine a teacher's performance that is independent of the students in her classroom?
I recall hearing once, perhaps 5 or 10 years ago, about someone in Tennessee who had developed a computerized database etc. which could keep track of each student's progress and which teachers they had. Using this, they could track how much students learned from which teachers.
All in all I am in favor of competition - letting the money follow the student one way or the other. I'm also in favor of ending compulsory education and abolishing most child labor laws, so children can learn the skills they will really need in the marketplace while getting paid for it. But even within the present system we could do much better . . . if the school boards were actually interested in educating students.
It used to be - 15 years ago, when I tried to tell people how screwy the proposed DMCA would be, and how awful copyright extension laws would be - that people would stare without comprehension.
It's nice that I don't have to explain the absurdity of the current copyright laws around here any more. Everything has already been said, and the younger generation is starting to simply ignore the multitude of imbecilic laws passed by the respective legislatures of the U.S. and the E.U. I sure hope it continues.
Eventually the old people will die off, and will only be a significant portion of the electorate in Chicago. Then things can change.
If you're serious about wanting to be able to upgrade, RUN CONDUIT. We have no idea what the next generation cabling will consist of, but whether it is Cat-6, Cat-6a, fiberoptic, some new-fangled fiberoptic, some sort of superconducting carbon tubes or what, you can pull the new cable through the old conduit.
Depending on your situation, you may not need actual conduit, or a full run. You may have a suspended ceiling, cable trays, raised floor, crawl space, attic, or an unfinished basement - but if it's going to be difficult to run a new line between a couple accessible points (as between a crawl space and an attic), then RUN SOME CONDUIT. It will make your life easier.
I'm afraid the NaziS of Fun (as we like to call them) restrict all traffic to The Pirate Bay website, so I can't add a comment on their blog - and there's no other internet service available here.
As it happens, I've never used bit-torrents and I buy my music on CDs and my movies on DVDs, mostly from regular stores (occasionally from Amazon or the like) - but I'd like to register my support for The Pirate Bay and its operators nonetheless. Copyright law is overgrown, and it needs to be cut down to size. Same with the MPAA and the RIAA.
Back in the days of USENET, before the September that never ended, lots of intelligent discussions on the internet. Some stupid stuff too, but erudite stupidity.
As people of moderate intelligence came online, the quality declined.
If the net is now flooded by short, staccato blips of stupidity, it just means that the idiots discovered how to get online. That's all.
However, all that I've found the Boy Scouts do is stand on their expressed belief system.
Oddly enough, other Boy Scout organizations around the world have the same Boy Scout Oath, but when I have mentioned to people from places like England and New Zealand that the Boy Scouts of America does not allow Atheists to join because of that oath, they are appalled. My understanding is that Baden-Powell himself never intended to exclude non-believers.
I believe the Boy Scouts of America simply uses the oath as a fig leaf for their bigotry.
Slashdot Mirror
With as many idiotic laws as we have on the books, it is virtually impossible that they will not commit crimes some day.
Probably tomorrow.
http://www.threefeloniesaday.com/
I was traveling through airports when I happened to see this story on the news, so I haven't caught up on all the details, but one thing disturbed me: the lying heads went on and on about how mentally disturbed this man must have been, and how could we identify such mentally disturbed people in the future, but never once did they ponder whether this was a rational response to an untenable situation. Never once did they question the role of a convoluted, maddening, and probably illegal tax code.
It is difficult living in a country where there is little rule of law because the multitude and complexity of laws makes virtually everyone eligible for a felony conviction at the arbitrary whim of unaccountable government officials. If Mr Stack had run into such persecution his response may well have been the only rational one. What other avenues were open to him to escape from the situation? Good riot police know that they should never cut off an angry crowd's escape routes, as they will have no choice but to fight, and most of us have heard of the dangers of a cornered animal, but what opportunities did Mr Stack have to avoid what he (probably accurately) described as a kind of slavery?
In short, if Mr Stack had no viable alternatives, or if he was feeling especially patriotic, this response may not have been irrational. If all his friends and colleagues never suspected that he was insane, it may be because he wasn't. The fact that his suicide note was angry and used profanity does not necessarily mean that Mr Stack was mentally unbalanced - it may simply mean that he had good cause to be angry. If someone tried to enslave you, would you be angry? Would you say some naughty words? If so, does that mean that you are wrong or mentally ill to object to being enslaved, or does it mean that the bastard who is trying to enslave you is wrong?
The fact is, all Americans have become or are becoming the slaves of the United States government, which in turn has become the instrument by which those who take more than they give (at present 60% of Americans) have harnessed the productive classes for their own benefit. This is the tyranny of the majority, and it looks like it will only increase in the future. Talking to people overseas, I have met many who envy American wealth but none who envy American "freedom".
The fact that the lying heads on the News never addressed this question concerns me. The American media is no longer interested in discovering the truth, they merely do the bidding of their employers - and with the U.S. government being the largest advertiser, guess who their employers are? It may well be that Mr Stack really WAS crazy, but we will never learn the truth from the media.
You are correct that it wouldn't be much use in an American house. However keep in mind that modern commercial architecture generally eschews load bearing walls in favor of pylons (reinforced concrete columns, that is) with "curtain walls" of brick or other material.
While houses in the USA are still built with 150 year old technology and load-bearing walls, most new public buildings in the USA are not - and thus this sort of protection could be quite useful. Modern architecture generally eschews load bearing walls in favor of pylons (reinforced concrete columns, that is) with "curtain walls" of brick or other material. A curtain wall giving way may even be an advantage in relieving some of the pressure from a blast, though how much of an advantage is open to debate.
Of course, the protection would only be partial, but I can see how this might be useful in some places.
Oversold as "bombproof wallpaper"? Of course. Useless? No.
One problem with your hypothesis: Regulations for the financial sector (and all sectors) dramatically INCREASED during the Bush administration.
Sure, Noonan's article is full of the usual partisan crap that comes out from the losing side in the last election, but it is nevertheless true. She does at least note that no one is looking to the Republicans for a solution either.
But I think she misses an awful lot:
First, there are many reasons why people have lost hope in America, and economics is just one small part of it. The moralistic laws passed by both parties to try to force everyone to adhere to their belief systems - whether religious or secular - are also responsible for a great deal of revulsion at what America has become. Truth is, there's no great difference between the person who tells you to profess a certain dogma or die, and the person who tells you that you'd better buckle up or face a hefty fine. They're both assholes out to tell others what they must do. Certainly there's room for persuasion and facilitating (making easy) good choices, but all the "leadership" on both left and right is committed to the idea that Americans must not be free.
Second, there IS a great deal of real OPTIMISM among many educated people - it's just that that optimism is somewhat retarded by the idiocies being perpetrated by government.
There is much to be optimistic about - we stand on the edge of what could be a golden age, if we can just get past the idiots who have hijacked the political and economic systems of the world for their own benefit. If we could prune back the cartels that dominate the financial, medical, and academic sectors (among others) and introduce freedom to compete and to cooperate without undue and burdensome regulations, then the future is very bright indeed.
But it looks like it might not be happening in America.
Now this is a corvette.
On the one hand, I absolutely agree with the author. I graduated from high school in 1988, and within 5 years I had recognized that the single most important course I took was a half-semester of typing. (Naturally, other subjects - taken as a whole - were more important.)
However, while students today would still be well-served to learn how to type, the technologies are now being developed which will eventually allow even faster data manipulation with direct mind interfaces that will make keyboards appear, as Scotty in Star Trek IV put it, "quaint". Intelligent students of education have long understood that by the time an educational institution understands the importance of new information, it has already been superseded - so I expect typing classes will become mandatory just about the time that the mainstream has forgotten about keyboards entirely.
We've known for years - or should have known - that at least some breeds of dog are pretty smart.
With recent discoveries about the importance of RNA and lateral genetic transfers, we may yet discover that dogs are our closest relatives.
Of course, other animals may also be smarter than we give them credit for, but these neotenous wolves have certain qualities in common with us that no other animals have, including an understanding of our body language - and, according to some studies, dogs may even have an ability to read our minds to some degree (look at the studies where the owner leaves home and then, though they are 30 miles away, the moment they turn around to come home their dog goes to the door to wait for them - also consider the use of dogs and cats to warn epileptics of seizures).
. . . and many of us have suspected that there are more such links between conditions which may be pathological at one extreme, and extremely beneficial at another extreme. The schizophrenia versus creativity duality is one (and long known - we have all heard that "there is a fine line between genius and insanity"), and the whole area surrounding Asperger's Syndrome is likely another.
Yup, sounds like Amerika.
Writing in from McMurdo Station, I should note that the actual sites that are currently manned are not especially good for freedom, as they follow the laws of the respective nations that have established them. The Antarctic Treaty is likewise becoming more and more restrictive. The great advantage is that there are many places where there is no one whatsoever, so that with sufficient technology and resources, a freedom-loving group might be able to establish their own community. On the other hand, there has been some serious interest in seasteading lately, by Patri Friedman and others. http://seasteading.org/
While Alberta has many things going for it, my friends there report that the place is socially conservative rather than libertarian. This presents its own set of problems, and I would not advise any Canadian province as a final destination, though Quebec may resist the changes longer than most. In fact, I would not recommend any existing nation, though of the English-speaking ones New Zealand may be the best.
I agree about the cruelty inherent in the U.S. legal system, and in fact in U.S. culture. Unfortunately, telling Americans to grow a backbone will not help, as many Americans are convinced that it is only because they have backbones and love God that they can be sufficiently cruel to those whom they suspect of doing wrong, or at least of having done something they don't quite understand so it must have been very bad.
Trying to reason with these people is pointless, because after all they have been educated in American schools, which for the last 100 years have been actively involved in retarding intellectual growth. (This is absolutely true - the people who set up the system even wrote books about how they were going to prevent the children of the lower classes from becoming doctors and lawyers because there were already plenty of those.) Any reasoned argument is met with furrowed eyebrows and looks of suspicion, and the more "righteous" they are, the quicker you'd best walk away.
Science Fiction author David Brin has already suggested installing peer-to-peer relays for text messages on mobile phones, as a means to ensure emergency communications could be maintained in case of a partial or complete breakdown of the wireless networks. Such a system would have been quite useful, for example, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and the bandwidth is so small as to be almost unnoticeable.
Of course, encryption would also be nice, but this would be a good start, to establish such a standard.
Note that the Nextel network already allows peer-to-peer calls, although it does not use phones as relays.
So, the first number was off by a factor of ten, not counting the silly estimate of 25 Pounds when even 2.5 Pounds was doubtless too much - meaning that the original number was off by at least a factor of one hundred.
Still nothing compared to what government and government-related groups can come up with to scare people. Anyone remember how we were all told in the '80s that 1.5 million children were kidnapped each year in the United States, when the real relevant figure (kidnappings by strangers) was closer to 150? That was off by a factor of 10,000.
And how about those Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq? We're going to find them any day now.
Yes, what this proves to us once again is that as bad and unethical as industry can be, they still can't compete with government and the do-gooders.
The FDA started out with a good mandate: make sure that what sellers are selling is actually what they claim to be selling.
If the seller says it's 100% disease-free milk, then that's what it should be - not watered down milk or from a diseased cow. And so on.
I know a man who had inherited a severe form of heart disease. All the males in his family died in their 40s, and he was getting close - he could barely stand the exertion of standing up. Then he was one of a handful of people who got some experimental gene therapy - and his health was pretty much restored.
That was about ten years ago.
His son is in his thirties now.
The question is, will the gene therapy that saved his father be legal in time to save him?
How many needless deaths will there be before it is legal?
If the FDA wanted to restrict such therapies only to patients who are deemed extremely likely to die within the next five years, that would be reasonable enough while they tested these drugs. If the FDA let doctors and patients make choices about what risks they were willing to take, but made sure that patients and doctors were fully informed as best as possible as to the potential risks of untested medicines - that would be reasonable too.
But, no, the FDA wants to cover their collective ass, and they know that no one pays attention to people who die for lack of access to new drugs, while they do pay attention to "failures" of the regulatory system - so the FDA outlaws new medicines that might save hundreds of thousands of terminal patients each year, on the grounds that these medicines might harm these dying patients.
It's not insane. It's politics.
These multinationals do pay substantial amounts of tax, on their American operations. Obama wants to increase the tax they pay on their operations outside the U.S.
Of course, these companies pay taxes on their foreign operations in the foreign jurisdictions, so this amounts to double taxation on their profits. No wonder they try to reduce what they owe by legally changing their headquarters to a nation like Bermuda that does not tax them twice.
Of course, a U.S. investor in a U.S. multinational ends up getting taxed three times for the same profits, so no wonder that U.S. citizens are leaving too - and they tend to be in the same 5% that pays 80% of U.S. taxes.
The United States government is attempting to commit suicide, and eventually they will succeed.
The US still has the largest percentage of the population completing upper secondary education (HS) of all countries in the world except Japan, and over the past forty years it has steadily increased (81% in 1960 to 87%).
Talk about lies, damned lies, and statistics.
School systems routinely cook the books, and I'm not sure about the national figure, but many school systems have graduation rates from 50 to 70 percent.
How can they fake that, you ask? Easy. They remove every student who "transfers" to a different high school from their numbers, even though many of those students never complete the transfer or even know (or care) that their high school has officially listed them as transferred. The 50 to 70 percent numbers are based on a more reliable comparison between the number of high school freshmen and the number of graduating seniors.
Granted, if you include G.E.D.s the numbers are higher, but G.E.D.s are a joke. So are many of the high school diplomas - I've known High School graduates who couldn't read theirs.
One (of many) problems with the American medical system is that it artificially restricts the number of people who can become doctors, which in turn drives up pay. Stop the hazing (which the typical process of becoming a doctor is) and increase the number of medical schools, and you'll probably get lots more qualified candidates who will work for more reasonable rates.
Japan has lots of medical colleges and only a few law schools - and despite everything else costing twice what it does in the USA, medical care is much better AND cheaper.
(My parents have used both systems, which is how I know.)
Is there any reasonable and objective way to determine a teacher's performance that is independent of the students in her classroom?
I recall hearing once, perhaps 5 or 10 years ago, about someone in Tennessee who had developed a computerized database etc. which could keep track of each student's progress and which teachers they had. Using this, they could track how much students learned from which teachers.
All in all I am in favor of competition - letting the money follow the student one way or the other. I'm also in favor of ending compulsory education and abolishing most child labor laws, so children can learn the skills they will really need in the marketplace while getting paid for it. But even within the present system we could do much better . . . if the school boards were actually interested in educating students.
It used to be - 15 years ago, when I tried to tell people how screwy the proposed DMCA would be, and how awful copyright extension laws would be - that people would stare without comprehension.
It's nice that I don't have to explain the absurdity of the current copyright laws around here any more. Everything has already been said, and the younger generation is starting to simply ignore the multitude of imbecilic laws passed by the respective legislatures of the U.S. and the E.U. I sure hope it continues.
Eventually the old people will die off, and will only be a significant portion of the electorate in Chicago. Then things can change.
I had always wondered how they detected lifeforms - even one or two lifeforms on an otherwise desolate planet - in Star Trek, Star Wars, and the like.
Now I know.
Incidentally, I'm right handed.
If you're serious about wanting to be able to upgrade, RUN CONDUIT. We have no idea what the next generation cabling will consist of, but whether it is Cat-6, Cat-6a, fiberoptic, some new-fangled fiberoptic, some sort of superconducting carbon tubes or what, you can pull the new cable through the old conduit.
Depending on your situation, you may not need actual conduit, or a full run. You may have a suspended ceiling, cable trays, raised floor, crawl space, attic, or an unfinished basement - but if it's going to be difficult to run a new line between a couple accessible points (as between a crawl space and an attic), then RUN SOME CONDUIT. It will make your life easier.
I'm afraid the NaziS of Fun (as we like to call them) restrict all traffic to The Pirate Bay website, so I can't add a comment on their blog - and there's no other internet service available here.
As it happens, I've never used bit-torrents and I buy my music on CDs and my movies on DVDs, mostly from regular stores (occasionally from Amazon or the like) - but I'd like to register my support for The Pirate Bay and its operators nonetheless. Copyright law is overgrown, and it needs to be cut down to size. Same with the MPAA and the RIAA.
Alan R. Light
Ross Island
Antarctica
Back in the days of USENET, before the September that never ended, lots of intelligent discussions on the internet. Some stupid stuff too, but erudite stupidity.
As people of moderate intelligence came online, the quality declined.
If the net is now flooded by short, staccato blips of stupidity, it just means that the idiots discovered how to get online. That's all.
Oddly enough, other Boy Scout organizations around the world have the same Boy Scout Oath, but when I have mentioned to people from places like England and New Zealand that the Boy Scouts of America does not allow Atheists to join because of that oath, they are appalled. My understanding is that Baden-Powell himself never intended to exclude non-believers.
I believe the Boy Scouts of America simply uses the oath as a fig leaf for their bigotry.